ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to resume the argument the author advanced in the lectures he gave in Cambridge in 1973, which were republished by Maurice Temple Smith and California as Too Serious a Business two years later. Here it was clear that the major historians had passed through and beyond the stage of regarding Europe simply as a geographical expression covering a number of unrelated nation states, separate in language, culture, race and ethical outlook one from another, engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival in a Hobbesian world. The military leadership groups also played an important internal role in maintaining the support on which the traditionalist deferential societies of the individual nation states rested and without which transnational relationships between the leadership groups of the individual states could not have been possible. The French remained wrapped in a cloak of gloom; yet France had no choice but to follow Britain.
